Friday, November 20, 2015

Today in 'can't he hear himself speak?'

So I get that the whole point of our political system is that people with different viewpoints can have their voices heard and that we, as a nation, can benefit from a diverse range of experience and perspectives, but holy shit, is he for goddamn kidding with this?

"You'll have to be more specific, I say many, many things that are insane.I'm an uh... an attention whore. Love the attention, so I say a lot of ridiculous shit.."

-Donald Trump (actual quote)*

The quickest way to lose an argument is to invoke
Hitler, so I'll just compare Trump to Chaplain's character, Adenoid Hykel in The Great Dictator.

With what? Oh, right, you never click on the links. Donald Trump, man...he told Yahoo News (which is still a thing) that he'd be into crazy town new security measures aimed solely at Muslim Americans which would included warrantless searches, special ID's and a database to track them. Yeah, a database. And to be clear, he's not talking about people associated with any particular extremist groups, this is just for Muslims in general. If this sounds a little fascist to you, that's just because it's extremely fascist. Am I using the word correctly? Fascist, I mean?

You know, because there's never been
Christian extremists in this country.

We have a tendency to throw around words and phrases like fascist, Nazi-esque and redstate shitmerchant when talking about the GOP's candidates, and I wonder sometimes if we're being unfair but then Trump comes along and announces that if elected, he plans to go all Project Wide Awake on an entire religious group. Like, what the hell? This after Ben Carson compared the refugees to rabid dogs, and Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz both said they want to only accept Christian refugees.

That's the top three Republican front runners (and Jeb Bush) all sounding like a creepy, poorly xeroxed and racist rant you find shoved under your windshield wiper when you come out of a Denny's. Aren't these guys supposed to be talking about smaller government, lower taxes and Ronald Reagan's confidence-inspiring hair that enabled him to single-handedly bring down Communism? Republicans used to be cool-well, that probably hasn't been true since Lincoln, but at least they used to not be pandering vitriolic xenophobes.

Look, I've never been a fan of the GOP personally, but it just seems like if we're only going to have a two-party system there should actually be two parties. Not one regular party and then one pack of lunatic ideologues gouging each other's eyes out over which one would go to the craziest lengths to persecute Muslims.

"I see your pansy-ass Christians-only immigration policy and raise you racial profiling, intrusive government monitoring and GPS anklets so we can track everyone who belongs to areligion that I don't like. Now who's the biggest nut job? I'll tell you, it's me. Vote Trump."

-The GOP Presidential frontrunner

*no it's not a real quote, but still...

Oh and hey, check it out:

CNN's story about Trump's Muslim database idea was preceded by an ad for the TV series based on Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. It's set in an alternate universe where the U.S. loses World War II and is run by fascists. Serendipitous ad choice or is CNN just being snarky? Or perhaps this is a grim portent of things to come. Can't wait to find out!